As the game ended, I put my travel tunes back on and began to reflect on this moment. What was making me feel so refreshed and hopeful and how do I maintain it?

Dominating the workplace headlines now are increased burnout, stress, inability to cope with workplace demands, high disengagement and the list goes on. There are also countless remedies being offered by way of conferences, hiring highly paid consultants to magically fix the palace and recommendations to reduce the number of work hours in a week just to name a few.

Finishing 2021 and leading into 2022, the challenges around building and maintaining a positive workplace culture will be a strategic priority that organizations and its’ senior leaders can no longer ignore or pass off to human resources as a sidebar project. Your employees and customers will demand much more and rightly so.

Leadership is not reserved for a title or position nor is it reserved strictly for the workplace. The demands for those who sign up to serve and impact the lives of others has never been more greater. For this reason, the importance of community and how we engage ourselves is not only good for others, it is good for ourselves. Leadership impacts community but just as important, community impacts leadership!

By now you have probably seen or heard countless challenges we will face as leaders and individual contributors in 2021. It is true that 2020 was like nothing most of us have ever seen so no need to belabor that point in this short read. What is just as exhausting though is the constant reminder of the new normal and what we all must do to adjust, adhere, or even just survive. The interesting component of all this? Most of these are things we should have been doing all along.

2020 started off just like any other year for me as I am fairly sure it did for you all as well. Johnson Health Center was off to a great start and I enjoyed two great speaking and leadership engagements through my Impact consulting venture. This was going to be a great year all-around. Of course, in mid-March everything changed.